More stories:
This time, the first story in a series of 6 that I wrote to introduce a character into a World of Darkness Mage game.
Her name was Diana. She never saw play, so I'm posting the stories for the enjoyment of others.
Edited to add: The plan was to play her in the role of antagonist to her sister, a woman called Anna, that would be played by another. We wrote stories collaboratively, from each of our characters positions. Anna's first story in this series is here.
The Incident - Step One: Motivation
We were in Argentina at the time. The whole family, mother and father and my younger sister. We were travelling around the province of Santa Fe, going where my parents had been directed by their church. We had been in the country a few years at that point. We had stayed with families that barely had enough room in their homes for themselves and we had slept nights in a tent at the side of the road a couple of times.
My sister seemed to be enjoying it at least. I just wanted to go home.
Our parents were Evangelical Christians, which wasn’t always popular in a country full of Catholics. I never really understood why it led them around a foreign country and why we had to go with them. I’d rather have had to stay with our distant relatives than keep driving around that backward place.
But that was my childhood for a long time, at least my father made sure my sister and I kept studying. It was often the only sign of intelligence I saw out there.
It didn’t last forever though. We were driving out of Sastre, a small town roughly central in the province. When a road block some miles out of the town stopped us. A few cars parked across the road, and some men wearing scarves over their faces.
Sastre was yet another grid patterned town, wholly unimaginative in its design, with another small time Evangelical Church looking for missionaries to adopt it and make it great. Our parents really did not make things better or great however. Their message of ‘love’ and ‘hope’ reached an underground gang that was heavily involved in the Catholic church. The Pastor of the church had hurried into the house they had funded for us and urged us to leave the city immediately, he said he’d had a letter and we needed to leave. He said that our lives were in danger. He said that they were planning to storm the house in the early morning and kill us all. They feared that we would make their little church great, and threaten the stability of the great Catholic hold on the town. My father refused the handgun the Pastor offered him, telling the pastor that ‘god’ would protect us.
Our parents didn’t know I was listening. I heard the entire conversation and was scared. I had packed most of the things I owned in a backpack when our father came into our room and told us to get everything that was ours, including our bedsheets.
The sun was beginning to set as our parents put some boxes in the back of the car and had Anna and me cover ourselves with our blankets in the back seat. We would drive for Buenos Aires and the British Embassy there, so our parents could get further orders from their church.
We drove a few miles out of the town, and we hit their roadblock. There was noise, the car doors opening. My sister and I frozen in the back. Our parents were dragged out. There was more noise. Tyres screeched and more car doors were opened. There was gunfire, car doors slamming, and then the screech of tyres again. The noise stopped for a few moments. I was still frozen and in shock. Anna was the first to move. The first to look.
I might have anticipated screaming, if I’d known what she’d seen. There was just this stunted and muted attempt to breathe in, over and over. The cars that had driven up were the police. They fumbled around the area before they realised Anna was standing outside the car looking on. They searched the car and found me, bundled up in the back unable to move. I didn’t see my parents bodies, the police made sure I didn’t.
The rest is more of a blur. We were put on a plane back to England where our aunt and uncle were waiting for us. We spent the rest of our childhood in their care.
I later learned why our parents had not left us with our aunt and uncle, both of them openly condemned our parents choice of life, and especially found fault with subjecting Anna and myself to it. I would have preferred to have stayed in England with them, if I’d been given the choice.
I still miss my parents. I’ll never forgive the people who did this to us.